Is UX Your Missing Growth Accelerator?

  • #ROI
  • #UXDesign
ux growth

UX design is essential for your business. You’ve heard this countless times. UX design creates a seamless, holistic experience for everyone that visits your site. UX design means you’re avoiding all those pesky, counter-intuitive design mistakes that leave visitors frustrated.

We tend to think that customer experience is the be all and end all of UX. Although the elements of UX are tailored to the customer experience, the true value lies somewhere deeper, closer to the core of your business.

A primary goal of UX is to create solutions for your business that ultimately provide a superior experience to your customers. But UX design is also about building from the inside, and it influences growth in ways you’re probably not thinking of. Implementing UX design tactics has a positive impact on a business’s growth potential, not only because it enhances the customer journey, but also because it reduces friction behind the scenes.

Let’s look at a few things that happen internally for your business when you leverage UX design for optimal growth potential.

Building Stronger Teams with UX Design

Each time you bring new talent onto your team, it’s like a breath of fresh air. New ideas and a fresh perspective are always a welcome addition. If only it were possible to snap your fingers and have a new team member automatically acclimate to their new position. Training is expensive and mistakes are costly. It would be awesome to avoid both.

To be fair, it isn’t always the new guy that costs more to train. Every time you implement new software or design, you’re going through the same training process with your current team. But, alas, it’s a necessary expense and one you’re willing to pay because there’s a great payoff just on the other side.

But, think of the cost saving potential if your business tools were intuitively designed and almost too easy to master. UX design creates a situation where team members are presented with a design that’s intuitive and easy to navigate. Each employee trained using UX design saves money in the onboarding process. For example, UX 4Sight’s senior leadership leveraged strategic UX design principles to reduce Verizon Wireless’ call center training staff training time from weeks to days.

Let’s also take a minute to talk about productivity. An article published by Wharton University of Pennsylvania lays it out pretty clearly. Businesses that put greater value on UX are more productive than those who don’t.

Your team is using your site every day to perform various aspects of their jobs, and UX affects it all, from customer service to analytics. The less time an employee spends dealing with technological performance issues, the more they can focus on the growth of your business. These are the people you hired to help make your brand great. It’s important to provide them with the best tools, including UX design.

Customer Support and Your Reputation

Have you taken the time to read any reviews on Google or Yelp lately? The next time that you do, take a good look at the difference between a 2-star and a 4-star experience. Consumers will usually knock something off a grade if the product or service failed to meet their expectations. But, the real hits almost always come from a lack of solid customer support.

For example, a customer makes a purchase and is unsatisfied. Granted, some customers won’t attempt a resolution and just leave a bad review. However, those that do seek help and are satisfied with the outcome won’t be so harsh in the review process.

Now, let’s translate this to UX. For some reason, you haven’t invested in UX design and there’s some user frustration as a result. One customer is having an issue with the checkout process and seeks out customer support. Of course, your customer service team jumps on this because you’re on the verge of a sale, and your reputation is on the line. Providing top notch support is the right thing to do.

But, what if that customer never needed to reach out to your support team? What if UX design made it so the checkout process was fast and seamless? Two things would happen. First, that 3 or 4 star review you would have received due to lack of UX would be boosted to a 5.  Second, the employee that helped could have been focusing on something else.

Just think of all the places you could direct employee energy if they weren’t helping customers navigate a poorly designed website or application.  Think it doesn’t really have an impact? McAffee demonstrated how prioritizing UX design reduced support costs by 90%.  For Verizon Wireless, UX 4Sight’s senior leadership innovated UX solutions that saved its call center many millions in Average Handle Time (AHT).

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Abdul Suleiman
Abdul SuleimanChief Experience Officer
Abdul Suleiman

Abdul has helped over 40 Fortune 500 companies make informed user-centered design decisions through evidence-based user research and UX best practices. As an Adjunct Professor, Abdul has taught in DePaul University’s graduate UX programs and for nine other universities.

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